Emma M.

An American Erasure in WWII

T

he Holocaust, and the subsequent US response to it, is venerated in American collective memory for its place as one of the few examples of true heroism in this nation’s history. However, beneath this cherished image lies a harder truth— that the Nazis were inspired by America’s successful institutionalization of racism. Despite the parallels between Nazi racial laws and American Jim Crow laws, United States officials and media have strategically framed discussions of the Holocaust to exclude race entirely, allowing America to maintain its narrative of moral superiority while simultaneously perpetuating white supremacy.During Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, German ideas of Aryan racial superiority and the inferiority of the Jewish people evolved as a result of German understandings of racism in the US. While America was blissfully ignorant of the connections between Jim Crow and Nazi racial laws, both the Nazis and the wider German population scrutinized the United States and its history of racial separation for commonalities, fallibilities, and guidance. German newspapers printed during the 1930s exemplify this analysis of the United States particularly well. For example, Der Weltkampf, a prominent Nazi ideological journal, published a piece in 1926 by Hans Richard Mertel which argued that “Slavery was morally justified in the Old South... and the Yankees had conducted a slave war [the Civil War] against the South because of ‘misguided humanity’” towards the

African Americans.1 This type of rhetoric glorifying the United States’ racial hierarchy was common during this time, with some pieces even going as far as to recommend that the US repeal the 14th and 15th amendments.2 The Nazis saw the US as an example of how to institutionalize white supremacy and thus looked to it for direction when modeling the Third Reich. Perhaps the most obvious instances of Jim Crow-inspired policy were the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which consisted of two parts—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and the Reich Citizenship Law. The former forbade all sexual relationships (marital or otherwise) between Jews and Aryans, in much the same way that interracial marriage was illegal in the South.3 The latter solidified the rules for citizenship in the Third Reich, formally classifying Jews as “enemies of the state” and stripping them of their civil rights. The Nazis defined Jewishness very methodically, creating three main racial categories—Aryan, Mischling, and Jewish—based on what percentage Jewish a person was. A person with one-eighth or less Jewish ancestry was deemed “Aryan,” while someone with three-fourths or more Jewish lineage was branded a “Jude.” Those that fell between the two extremes acquired the pejorative legal label “Mischling,” meaning “half-breed,” and only partly gained German citizenship. Those with this label could also be reclassified as Jews based on close relationships with “full Jews” or—in a deviation from the typical racialization of Jews—if they were a part of the Jewish religious community. It is crucial to recognize that the Nuremberg laws were a reflection of how broader Nazi antisemitism was rooted in the fear of the “subhuman” Jewish race defiling the superior Aryan race. This racebased vilification of a people is precisely why Germans so easily saw the parallels between Nazi policies and Jim Crow.

Hitler’s efforts to gain support in America appealed specifically to German people living in the US, hoping to win their allegiance through a message of ethnic nationalism that grew from the definition of Aryans as the “master race.” Unfortunately for the Nazis, this strategy was quite unsuccessful—while German Americans showed some interest in Hitler’s plans to retake Germany’s historic colonial possessions and resettle them with Aryans, nearly all rejected Nazism as an ideology entirely.4 German organizations like Stahlhelm (the German veterans’ organization) and the German Foreign Institute attempted to sway German Americans through equating cultural pride with Nazi solidarity, but their reach was limited and in many cases opposed. For example, “at one German-American celebration in New Braunfels [Texas], the organizers refused to hoist the German flag with its swastika to the chagrin of both the Stahlhelm paper and the German consul, who left the celebration in protest.” 5 Especially given the failure of this ethnonationalist campaign, it is important to note that Nazism was rife not only with antisemitism but also with anti-Blackness, which could have provided a very effective nationwide campaign in the Jim Crow US. However, the Nazis may have avoided capitalizing on anti-Blackness for fear of inciting backlash against the Third Reich, as the American people could not square the hypocrisy of criticizing Nazi racial supremacy while upholding the same type of racial hierarchy at home and were likely to become defensive if such a direct comparison were made.

1 Grill, Johnpeter Horst and Robert L. Jenkins. “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (1992): 675. Accessed May 11, 2021. doi:10.2307/2210789.

2 Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South,” 677.

3 Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South,” 692.

4 Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South,” 681.

America needed a way to understand the Nazi oppression of the Jews in a way that did not disrupt the Black-white binary set in place by Jim Crow—after all, accepting the Nazi persecution of the Jews on the basis of race would have forced some uncomfortable introspection on the ideals of white supremacy in the United States. To do so, the government allowed Jews to occupy a rather odd in-between state with regards to the American racial hierarchy, marking them as “almost-white.” Until after World War II, the United States classified Jews as a distinct race on census and immigration documentation, which was the root of much discussion among Jews and non-Jews alike. Unofficially, though, Jews were understood to be a part of, or at least adjoin, the broader “white” race, and thus did not face the same extent of oppression that Black people experienced in the United States. This tolerance of Jews as a separate race led many Jewish groups to encourage this label, as “in a period of increasing secularization and shifting social boundaries, ‘race’ offered Jews a more compelling means of self-understanding than did more traditional markers of Jewish identity.” 6 Notwithstanding, though Jews were tolerated, they still faced many negative stereotypes and discrimination. Some Jews hoped that by accepting a separate racial classification, they could gain recognition for their positive contributions to American society and dispel the rampant antisemitism.

However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Jews’ ability to hold on to their Jewish racial identity while being accepted as part of the white community was waning. This point of inflection with regard to Jewish identity later dovetailed with America’s chosen reconciliation of the moral hypocrisy of criticizing the Nazis while permitting Jim Crow—which principally involved the erasure of the specific targeting and racialization of the Jews under Nazism. For example, white-run newspapers during the Holocaust “invoked the extermination to prove that their own paternalistic white supremacy had no relationship to the extreme Nazi racial ideology and its violent manifestations.” 7 By highlighting the brutality of the Holocaust rather than its specific targets, Americans framed the Jewish genocide within a larger narrative of Nazi inhumanity, which they contrasted sharply against America’s comparative benevolence. American willful blindness to the specific Jewish focus of the Nazis also allowed US lawmakers to pass increasingly restrictive immigration laws against multiple groups, including Jews—using the “Jewish” racial classification that was https://academic.oup.com/DocumentLibrary/HGS/HGS%20Introduction%20Virtual%20Issue%20

5 Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South,” 681.

6 Goldstein, Eric L. “Contesting the Categories: Jews and Government Racial Classification in the United States.” Jewish History 19, no. 1 (2005): 81. Accessed June 5, 2021. http://www.jstor. org/stable/20100947.

7 Bendersky, Joseph W. “Holocaust-Era American Antisemitism.” Virginia Commonwealth University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2018): 5. Accessed June 6, 2021.

Antisemitism%202.pdf the subject of such debate—before and during World War II, which prevented thousands from escaping the Holocaust.8 The other key American tactic in erasing the racial nature of the Holocaust was by explaining the persecution of the Jews as purely religious. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee does an excellent job exemplifying the prevailing American attitude toward the Holocaust at the time: “[The fictitious teacher Miss Gates] cannot acknowledge that the motive behind Nazi policy might not be anti-religious but ‘racial’ prejudice instead; and the Third Reich differs from the United States because ‘over here we don’t believe in persecuting anybody.’”9 It is precisely this placing of Nazi antisemitism and American white supremacy into distinct buckets—this separation of Old World and New World hatred—that allowed America to take the moral high ground against the Nazis in self-proclaimed ideology while remaining strikingly similar in practice.

The United States’ stubborn desire to prove that it was morally superior to Nazi Germany and righteous in its condemnation of the Final Solution has endured to this day. The mythologization of the Holocaust in American memory takes many forms, but the prevailing narrative is of a noble, pluralistic United States battling against the evils of global fascism, and serves to further differentiate Nazi racism from American racism. A curious example of this conscious narrative-building is the existence of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. According to historian Norman Finkelstein, “the presence of the Holocaust Museum...is ‘particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history’...[specifically] the slave trade and genocide against the American Indians.” 10 The fixation on the Holocaust to prove American exceptionalism has in many ways co-opted the Jewish experience of that history while also rewriting the story to better fit the desired image of America as ultimate savior. While in reality the United States and the Allied forces were much more concerned with securing a military victory than rendering humanitarian aid during World War II, our national story instead flaunts images of starving, emaciated prisoners being liberated from Auschwitz by the Allied forces.11 This sort of representation seeks to portray the Jews as a helpless minority that the kind American nation saved from the most horrific circumstances imaginable—a rare, though commendable, example of the United States helping a minority that has become emblematic of the character of this nation. At the same time, the rapid decline of Jewishness as a separate racial category in the US after World War II has led to the erasure of the key racial component of the Holocaust from popular memory, effectively stripping away Jewish identity as distinct from whiteness while handing the Jews the memory of the Holocaust as a “civil religion”—a reminder of their debt to America.12

8 Goldstein, “Contesting the Categories,” 86.

9 Whitfield, Stephen J. “The South in the Shadow of Nazism.” Southern Cultures 18, no. 3 (2012): 66-7. Accessed May 10, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26217314.

10 Friedberg, Lilian. “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust.” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000): 354-55. Accessed June 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185909.

11 “The United States and the Holocaust, 1942–5,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed June 4, 2021, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/ article/the-united-states-and-the-holocaust-1942-45

12 Friedberg, “Dare to Compare,” 354-5.

Works Cited

1. Bendersky, Joseph W. “Holocaust-Era American Antisemitism.” Virginia Commonwealth University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2018). Accessed June 6, 2021. https://academic.oup. com/DocumentLibrary/HGS/HGS%20Introduction%20Virtual%20Issue%20Antisemitism%202.pdf

2. Friedberg, Lilian. “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust.” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000): 353-80. Accessed June 3, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185909.

3. Goldstein, Eric L. “Contesting the Categories: Jews and Government Racial Classification in the United States.” Jewish History 19, no. 1 (2005): 79-107. Accessed June 7, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20100947.

4. Grill, Johnpeter Horst, and Robert L. Jenkins. “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (1992): 667-94. Accessed May 11, 2021. doi:10.2307/2210789.

5. “The United States and the Holocaust, 1942–5,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed June 4, 2021, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-unitedstates-and-the-holocaust-1942-45

6. Whitfield, Stephen J. “The South in the Shadow of Nazism.” Southern Cultures 18, no. 3 (2012): 57-75. Accessed May 10, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26217314.

Emma M. (class of 2022) found great excitement in exploring the humanities at Nueva. She wrote this essay for her 11th-grade American history class, to better understand the role of the United States in the Holocaust, as well as how she fits into this nation’s broader history, as a Jewish person. In her free time, she enjoys morning runs, watching women’s college basketball, and curling up with a good book.